Trying to restore old backup disks from early 90's

Have 41 old backup disks from Windows 3.1 named DEFAULT FUL which I cannot seem to restore. There is no backup program showing in 3.1; reinstalled 3.1 recently on a different drive. When using restore (restore A: C:) from DOS 6.22 boot disk it does not recognize the disks as backup disks. But when using an old hard drive in the computer which does no longer works, it shows the disks as Windows backup disks; can't figure out if this was made from DOS or something else; and don't know if they contain just data or all the programs that were on my failed hard drive. Need some help figuring out how to restore the information on the back-up disks, Using an old Compaq Contura 3/25 with Windows 3.1 reinstalled on a working drive of that era.

Win3.1 in and of itself didn't come with a backup program, but later (>v.6) MS-DOS versions came with a "Windows Interface" (MWBACKUP) to the DOS backup program. Unfortunately the version of DOS appears to have been critical:

Also, DOS/Win3.1 may not help at all if the backup was created with something other than that (but a .ful file extension is consistent with a full backup using DOS). Since compression schemes for backups differed with every program, you'd need the exact program (and maybe even version) of whatever created them, if it was something else.

Another negative---floppy disks don't survive terribly long unless they're kept in ideal conditions, so you would likely have to make sure the last disk (and maybe all of them) would be readable before recovering the backup. The last disk being the one where the catalog (index) of all the stored files would be on the preceding set.

Yes, I can see that. I also read that the Norton backup was part of DOS 6.2 which I am trying to get; Also read it was later changed on DOS 6.22 which I am using right now and does not recognize the backup disks as backup disks. Hope 6.2 works.

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